Kendall County Times

As time dwindles for a remedy to the state’s pension crisis, taxpayers are stuck in an equation of increasing taxes and declining services, according to an Illinois Policy Institute study.

The study, which predicts the pension system could be broke in 20 years, revealed that “core services including child protection, state police and college money for poor students has dropped by nearly one-third since 2000.”

Money once earmarked for those services has instead been redirected to cover pension funding, the report said. Between 2000 and 2020, pension funding has increased more than 500 percent, whereas spending for health insurance and education have only increased 127 percent and 21 percent, respectively.

Former Kendall County GOP chair James Marter

Former Kendall County GOP chair James Marter compared the Illinois pension crisis to a Ponzi scheme.

“It’s a huge problem,” Marter told the Kendall County Times. “It’s promising payments to people with money that has never come in and is never going to come in. Sooner or later, we’re going to have to pay the piper.”

But Democrat lawmakers seem reluctant to even take up the issue of pension reform, Marter said. Instead, they have relied on tax increases to shore up the pensions.

Marter, a 14th District candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives, said the best way out from under the pension debt burden would be what he called market-based solutions.

“Why not let people manage their own pensions with fund managers they want to work with?” he said. “Move people to a contribution-based pension system. That’s what the rest of us have to do. Not pensions that are based on pay to play.”

He pointed to the recent gas and cigarette tax hikes, as well as a plethora of fee increases, as evidence that Gov. J.B. Pritzker and his Democrat cohorts in the legislature prefer to deal with the crisis by collecting more money from taxpayers.

“To be frank, the voters in Illinois better wake up and understand who’s robbing them of their paychecks,” Marter said. “If you have a paycheck in Illinois, whether you’re lower, middle or upper class, you are the rich they want to tax.”